I can see you

Chapter 34

(EDWARD'S POV)

The orphanage was colder than than any building I had ever entered. Not colder in temperature but colder in weight. Colder in the way memory and fear presses in around the ribcage when you realize a place is more grave than building. I stayed close behind Rosy as we walked through the hall. Her back was straight, shoulders taut, but I could tell the silence was not comfort or confidence but costume. One she had woven from every fragile thread of resistance left in her, keeping herself from falling apart.

The thunder hadn’t let up. Not since we left the house. It echoed overhead in steady dull cracks, like something above us was waiting for a cue to strike.

By the time we entered the first corridor of the dormitory wing, the floorboards felt softer beneath my feet, not rotting but warped, like they were breathing. The rain beat harder against the roof. And that’s when it started. The maze. It wasn’t a physical labyrinth. The architecture of the orphanage hadn’t changed or maybe it had, in the ways only memory can but the windows no longer showed the sky. Some were painted black and others reflected rooms we weren’t standing in.

Doors opened into stairwells, even when they hadn’t before. One closet door revealed a long hallway lit entirely by red emergency lights. Another held a mirror, just a single large mirror with golden metallic edges mounted on the opposite wall, reflecting a version of me I didn’t recognize.

I stepped closer, expecting to see Rosy behind me but the woman in the reflection wasn’t quite her. The features were the same, but the expression was wrong. It was sharper and still like someone wearing her face but none of her history. There was no trace of the trembling, fragmented girl I’d held in my arms. There was only a calm, collected version staring back with a gaze that didn’t move when she did. At first, I thought it was a trick of the warped glass, the strange angles of this place. But then she tilted her head, not in sync with the real Rosy beside me and something ancient stirred in my chest. Whoever I was looking at it wasn’t just Rosy anymore. It was what was left after Riya stopped knocking and started answering.

My first instinct was to smash the mirror. To reach through the glass and drag out whatever was pretending to be her but my hand didn’t move. I was frozen. The reflection didn’t blink. It didn’t even flinch. It just kept watching me, like it was waiting for something. For me to confess. Or crack. Or maybe just admit what I already knew— That this place wasn’t built to trap our bodies. It was built to fracture our minds.

The scent of lilac clung to the air, stronger now. Sickeningly sweet and disgusting. The disgust, it didn’t come from the room. It came from memory. From guilt of not protecting her back then from her mother’s games and now not being able to shild her from the lies Killian had stitched into every hallway.

I turned from the glass, heart pounding, but the corridor behind me was no longer the one I’d come from. The walls felt unfamiliar and the doors looked different.  The light here was dimmer and I was standing alone. Not just separated from Rosy but isolated. My chest tightened and panic rose like a wave about to crest—until I caught a flicker. A swaying curtain of dark hair just ahead, vanishing around the corner.

“Rosy?” I called out, stepping forward. But she didn’t turn back. She was already gone, slipped into another corridor.

And something in me knew it might not be her I was following anymore. I turned left and then right. Mirrors again. So many of them. Too many. One entire hallway was lined with glass on both sides, the kind they used in dance studios. I caught my reflection from every angle. I was walking, but in the glass, I wasn’t. In the glass, I was still and watching with eyes that were too calm.

I blinked hard, trying to reset my mind but when I turned, I saw him. Sitting on an old wooden bench at the edge of the corridor, exactly like he used to sit on the porch back home. Elbows on knees. That gentle, lopsided smile I hadn’t seen in years.